"The robbery should have taken 10 minutes. 4 hours later, the bank was like a circus sideshow. 8 hours later, it was the hottest thing on live T.V. 12 hours later, it was all history. And it's all true."|"The Robbery Should Have Taken Ten Minutes. Eight Hours Later, it was the Hottest Thing on Live TV. And it's All True."

On a hot Brooklyn afternoon, two optimistic losers set out to rob a bank. Sonny (Al Pacino) is the mastermind, Sid (John Cazale) is the follower, and disaster is the result. Because the cops, crowds, TV cameras, and even the pizza man have arrived. The "well-planned" heist is now a circus.

Pacino and director Sidney Lumet, collaborators on Serpico, reteam for this boisterous comedy/thriller that earned six Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture) and won an Oscar for Frank Pierson's steetwise screenplay. Based on a true incident, Dog Day Afternoon "is one of the big ones, swarming with energy, excitement and drama" (Gene Shalit, NBC TV).

"...modern cinema's template for the bank-robbery-gone-wrong flick is this one.Christopher Null, Filmcritic.com"Bitingly funny and wonderfully compassionate.New York Daily News"Few fictional thrillers are as tense or as funny as this real-life recreation.John J. Puccio, DVD Town"One of Pacino's best. One of Lumet's best. It's a true American classic.Scott Weinberg, eFilmCritic.com"...brims over with energy, rude humor and understated pathos.Stephen Farber, MovieLine

Editor's Note

Al Pacino plays a ferocious and fed-up bank robber in Lumet's classic film DOG DAY AFTERNOON. Balancing suspense, violence, and humor, the film's depiction of a grand-scale media event craftily dives from the political to the personal, evoking a piercing portrait of a man and his devastating downward tumble as seen through the media circus that Lumet made a career of chronicling. Pacino is heartbreakingly real as Sonny, a smart yet self-destructive Brooklyn tough whose plan to rob the local bank to fund his male lover's (Chris Sarandon) sex change goes absurdly wrong. Accompanied only by his doltish accomplice, Sal (John Cazale), Sonny realizes that all the money had been removed before his arrival, and decides to kidnap a handful of bank employees instead. As the lengthy August day drags on, Sonny and hordes of local police, led by Sergeant Moretti (Charles Durning), make little progress, and eventually Sonny's wife and lover are brought to the scene. The crowd's sympathy is immediately captured by the charismatic Sonny, whose antagonism with the police is played out before an audience of millions, leading to an inevitably tragic finish.

Memorable Quotes

"He wants to know when you'll be through."----Jenny (Carol Kane), repeating to Sonny (Al Pacino) what her husband is asking her on the phone as he's robbing the bank

"No, I don't want to be paid, I don't need to be paid. Look, I'm here with my partner and nine other people, see. And we're dying, man. You know? You're going to see our brains on the sidewalk, they're going to spill our guts out. Now, are you going to show that on television? Have all your housewives look at that? Instead of AS THE WORLD TURNS? I mean, what do you got for me? I want something for that."----Sonny

"Attica! Attica!"----Sonny to the crowds outside the bank

Professional Reviews

Uncut 4 stars out of 5 -- "Pacino gives one of the performances of his career....Lumet's gritty 1970s landmark remains one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to deal with gay and transsexual characters in a relatively unsensational manner..." 03/01/2006 p.132

Sight and Sound "The combination of simmering tension, comedy and pathos is adroitly handled by the director and his excellent cast." 05/01/2006 p.88

Chicago Sun-Times 9 of 10Criminals become celebrities because their crimes provide fodder for the media. Many of the fashionable new crimes -- hijacking, taking hostages -- are committed primarily as publicity stunts. And a complex relationship grows up among the criminals, their victims, the police, and the press...That's the subject, in a way, of Sidney Lumet's pointed film...But Lumet's film is also a study of a fascinating character: Sonny, the bank robber who takes charge, played by Al Pacino as a compulsive and most complex man. He's street-smart, he fought in Vietnam, he's running the stick-up in order to get money for his homosexual lover to have a sex-change operation...The movie has an irreverent, quirky sense of humor, and we get some notion of the times we live in when the bank starts getting obscene phone calls -- and the giggling tellers breathe heavily into the receiver. - Roger Ebert

Reel.com 10 of 10When Al Pacino won the Best Actor Oscar in 1993 for Scent of a Woman, it was typical of the Academy: The award was long overdue--he'd been nominated eight times--and given for a lesser performance in an inferior film. He should have won back in the 1970s, if not for either of his turns as Michael Corleone in The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, then for his role as desperate bank robber Sonny in Sidney Lumet's true-crime saga Dog Day Afternoon. After more than 30 years, the latter is as taut and vital on the new Warner Bros. double-disc special edition DVD as it must have been on the big screen back in 1975...Above all, this is Pacino's movie. Hands down, he gives one of the finest performances of his career. It's moving and emotional; exhaustion is etched into his face as the night wears Sonny down. - Pam Grady